Thumbnail Image

Gender gap in agricultural labour productivity: A cross-country comparison

Background paper for The status of women in agrifood systems








Piedrahita, N., Costa, V. and Mane, E. 2024. Gender gap in agricultural labour productivity: A cross-country comparison – Background paper for The status of women in agrifood systems. Rome, FAO.



Also available in:
No results found.

Related items

Showing items related by metadata.

  • Thumbnail Image
    Booklet
    Gender pay gaps among agricultural and non-agricultural wage workers: a cross-country examination
    Background paper for The status of women in agrifood systems
    2023
    Also available in:
    No results found.

    While gender pay gaps in higher-income countries have been extensively studied, less information is available about the status of the gender pay gap in lower-middle-income countries (LMICs). This study provides new empirical estimates of the gender pay gap in agricultural and non-agricultural wage employment across a sample of ten LMICs covering multiple regions. The Kitagawa–Oaxaca–Blinder decomposition approach is used to unpack the factors that explain the pay gap across the sample of countries. The analysis shows large and significant gender gaps in pay in both agricultural and non-agricultural wage employment. Across the sample, the gender wage gap in favour of men is on average 18.4 percent in agricultural wage employment and 15.1 percent in the non-agricultural sector (unweighted means). The unexplained part of the gap, which is associated with discrimination and other unobservable factors such as skills, preferences or social norms, is the largest contributor to the wage gap in both sectors. However, differences in education, sector of employment and access to full-time employment also contribute to the gap. This background paper was prepared to inform Chapter 2 of FAO’s report on The status of women in agrifood systems: https://www.fao.org/documents/card/en/c/CC5060EN .
  • Thumbnail Image
    Book (stand-alone)
    Agricultural mechanization and child labour in developing countries
    Background study
    2022
    Also available in:
    No results found.

    The FAO-IFPRI study, focuses on the use of tractors because they are among the most versatile farm mechanization tools and are universal power sources for all other driven implements and equipment in agriculture, with significant potential to replace animal draught power and human power, including children’s muscle power. Tractor use is typically also the first type of machine-powered equipment in use at lower levels of agricultural development, the context where most child labour is found. Mechanization is mostly assumed to reduce child labour, as it is expected to be labour saving in general. Yet, this is not always the case, as it has also been observed that the use of tractors and other machinery could increase children’s engagement in farm activities. This may be the case if, for instance, their use allows farms to cultivate larger areas, or if it leads to shifting chores of work from hired labor to family workers, e.g. for weeding edges of farmland not reachable by machinery. Evidence has been scant thus far, but the few available studies have mostly lent greater support to the hypothesis that mechanization reduces children’s productive engagement. Most available studies have focused on specific cases and based on scant data. The new FAO-IFPRI study provides a rigorous quantitative assessment for seven developing countries in Asia (India, Nepal and Viet Nam) and sub-Saharan Africa (Ethiopia, Ghana, Nigeria and Tanzania) based on comparable farm household survey data.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Book (stand-alone)
    Levelling the farm fields: A cross-country study of the determinants of gender-based yield gaps
    Background paper for The status of women in agrifood systems
    2024
    Also available in:
    No results found.

    The State of Food and Agriculture 2010–11 brought to global attention the problem of female farmers lagging in terms of agricultural productivity compared with male farmers. This study returns to the question of gender-based differences in farm productivity, decomposing differences in farm yields between males and females. We identify one part of the gap explained by differences in attributes and access to productive assets, and another part explained by differences in returns to assets and attributes (i.e. “unexplained” differences). This paper applies the Kitagawa-Oaxaca–Blinder decomposition to gender-based productivity gaps using nationally representative household surveys from 11 developing countries in Asia, sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America. We estimate productivity models for each country utilizing a comparable set of explanatory assets and attributes. We also implement a comparable decomposition of observed productivity gaps. The cross-country analysis shows that observed total gaps in productivity by gender do not always favour male farmers; the decomposition of these gaps, however, reveals that female farmers face gender-specific constraints that manifest as lower returns to attributes and assets.This background paper was prepared to inform Chapter 2 of FAO’s report on The status of women in agrifood systems.

Users also downloaded

Showing related downloaded files

No results found.